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Fred
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Post by Fred »

Even now i'm pleased to download a software which sizes only a few KB: it's faster and proves the developper knows what he's doing :)
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Rook Zimbabwe
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Post by Rook Zimbabwe »

Very true Fred!!!

And lets not forget that the company I used to work for did Tech Services for all this sort of stuff (US BAnk and SCHWAB were among ourcustomers) and they have MICR Printers... long and short... over 50% of the time the error was in the drivers ((which includes new versions of software not speaking right to th drivers!)
:D
Keep up the good work!
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Post by PB »

> years ago you had to squeeze every last byte of space you could but now
> in this day of masses of storage and ram it just doesn't matter anymore.

Real coders still do it. ;) Not optimising just because the RAM is there is laziness.
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Post by byo »

It's very nice and interesting to read all these interesting points of view from different people from different cultures. It seems most of us all share basicly the same opinion towards size of the executable and other matters.

I realise that in the past, things were very complicated for software developers. Now we have the internet and we can share our knowledge, and evolve faster in this open-minded fashion.

Heck, even the owner of the company which creates our compiler and IDE is sharing his points of view and knowledge. What more could one ask for?

I bet you guys remember a time when right after buying a software at store, you were on your own. No 1.05, 1.06 betas, no additional documents besides the included manual, no support, etc. Even more if you live in a third world country, like me.

These days, I can learn in 2 months what I used to learn in years. And communities like this one are better than many IT schools.
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Post by DoubleDutch »

The world has changed very quickly it's true.

Today (for games) I use the extra RAM to have things like expanded tables and graphic masks, etc. Things I would have had to work out during game time I now expand during the front-end intro, to shave off cycles where they are important.

For serious stuff you still have to consider that yours may not be the main program running, so keeping RAM use low is still a must. A quarter of a second delay here or there is not so important as in a game - where it would be fatal for gameplay.
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djes
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Post by djes »

We're living in a bloatware world. Sometimes I'm almost sure that everything runs slower and slower only to help hardware manufacturers sell their stuff.

The most optimised routine in my game is the slower one on vista :cry:
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Post by PB »

> I bet you guys remember a time when right after buying a software
> at store, you were on your own. No 1.05, 1.06 betas, no additional
> documents besides the included manual, no support, etc

Very true. And you know what else? It all worked with NO bugs. Seriously.
They took a lot better care with software writing back then. I never found
a problem in an app back in the late 70s and into the 80s. You could count
on stuff back then. Everything just worked, and worked well.
Last edited by PB on Sun Oct 07, 2007 11:05 am, edited 1 time in total.
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electrochrisso
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Post by electrochrisso »

Bloatware is bill gates forte. PureBasic is anti bloatware.
byo
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Post by byo »

I agree with you guys.
So much bloatware these days. An example:

We work with Delphi 6 Enterprise in my company. Delphi is good for RAD purposes and it fits well in database development, debugger is great, etc.

But it generates bloatware (unless you're very advanced in using it). I made a little backup utility for SQL Server in Purebasic and it uses ODBC. My company has its own made in Delphi with native drivers.

My company's EXE size is 750 KB and slower than the PB one which is 100 KB in size. This can't be used as a real comparison, but you get the idea.

Too many programmers these days count on premade components, like VCLs, RTLs, etc. and make too little effort in understanding how the component works, how it accesses the memory, if it can be optimized. Many bugs and slow performance applications are because of that. Those who take their time to learn, are always one step further, IMHO.
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Post by Pantcho!! »

Just the other day i talked with someone i met that all that C# and .NET is total bloat and i hate it.

Most of the people i talk with this about says that almost ALL compilers are like this like VB and C++ cuz they use a lot of libs.

And i say them again, even if its more common its still crap!
Thank god you guys think the same, yes it show why we all like PureBasic or i might say in love in PureBasic :P

As for computer speeds... i got one thing to say
VISTA SUCKS!!

its the worst most unintuitive system i have ever worked with.

IT SLOW
ITS a total mass in configuring and doing stuff
ITS SLOW
and i used it on 2gb ram and 2ghz processor,

my old 1700mhz computer with winxp from 2001 is 5 times faster then that.

geez the world is going insane
at least you guys not :P

end rant.
byo
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Post by byo »

Pantcho!! wrote:
IT SLOW
ITS a total mass in configuring and doing stuff
ITS SLOW
and i used it on 2gb ram and 2ghz processor,

my old 1700mhz computer with winxp from 2001 is 5 times faster then that.

Buy Windows VISTA now:

It'll show you only what's neat
It'll fulfill your HD until it's complete
It'll render your hardware obsolete

:!:
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Post by r_hyde »

On the subject of attitudes toward optimization, the project lead on one of the software projects where I work wrote an application which loaded hundreds (or even thousands) of image thumbnails into RAM when it only needed to display perhaps 48 thumbnails at a time. The result was that it was crashing or running very slowly on a number of our workstations as they ran out of memory. When I asked him why he didn't implement some sort of simple paging scheme to manage the memory better, his response was "because RAM is cheaper than my time." Yikes! The fact that he's a senior developer while I'm at least 3 tiers below him, is a constant source of frustration to me.
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Post by Raybarg »

I love reading this thread, makes me go back in time to think about '89 when I started my own BBS and already programming in C/C++. Things were really so different back then. I learned programming by taking notebook and sitting in library reading programming books and making notes, then tried the stuff at home in practice. Those were guarded books, expensive so I couldnt borrow them to home.

Me and my friends had these speed/size competitions to make simple mode13/modeX demo applications and see who squeezed them to smaller size. Those were the times we were not professionals and such "competitions" allways taught us alot about how scopes affect executable size and so on...

Then I worked in one project for over 10 years making one database-oriented system starting from Visual Basic's earlier versions and upgrading whole system over time to new VB versions (I left the project before it was upgraded to .Net which was a quite difficult I heard). I moved to emdedded programming working with RTOS'es and got back to the "roots" where the kernel was my playground while implementing features or changing something older. Directly affecting how drivers react was not that weird any longer.

That VB project was real bloatware, the core executable was at size of over 20MB!!! Sometimes during that project the optimization was forgotten and stupid design was seen here and there, just because it didnt matter. Quite a different thing with embedded system with very little memory and very not much CPU time to share between tasks :)

Somehow it seems alot of bad code is dug deep under our programming layers these days, noone really knows (or cares) how much those hoard resources from system. ODBC for example is one thing; Put tracking on and see how much communication there is for simple one-line select query. And I am not expert enough to see if all that communication is necessary... on my previous tests such query resulted with as much as over 2 megabytes large .LOG file.

And I too simply LOVE PB! :) Small executables makes me feel warm and cuddly :lol:
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Post by Fangbeast »

Ahh, the good old days of running BBS's. Mine was on a 300baud modem and boy, was it fun. You got to know absolutely everyone.

Back in those days, coders didn't just write code, they rewrote their own prom chips for absolutely anything. One guy didn't like someone else's crappy drive controller chip (Amstrad CPC664) so he wrote his own. Woohoo, double side 5 1/4"d rives!!

Damn, I miss running a friendly bbs.
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DoubleDutch
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Post by DoubleDutch »

Why don't you start a BBS again?

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